by Jan Plamper
Figure 2.26. Day of the Stalin Constitution, the last holiday of the year. Pravda, 5 December 1947, 1.
Plate 1. Isaak Brodsky, Lenin at the Smolny (1930). Oil on canvas, 190 × 287 cm. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.
Plate 2. Dmitry Nalbandian, Portrait of J. V. Stalin (1945). Oil on canvas, 221 × 144 cm. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Plate 3. Aleksandr Gerasimov, Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin (1938). Oil on canvas, 296 × 386 cm. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Plate 4. Iury Kugach, Vasily Nechitailo, and Viktor Tsyplakov, “Glory to the Great Stalin!” (1950). Oil on canvas, 351 × 525 cm. © 2007, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Plate 5. Boris Ioganson, Leonid Tanklevsky, and Aleksandr Khomenko, J. V. Stalin among the People in the Kremlin (Our Wise Leader, Dear Teacher.) (1952). Oil on canvas, 410 × 530 cm. © 2007, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Plate 6. Grigory Shegal, Leader, Teacher, and Friend (J. V. Stalin in the Presidium of the Second Congress of Kolkhoz Farmer–Shock Workers in February 1935). (1936–1937). Oil on canvas, 340 × 260 cm. © 2007, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Plate 7. Iosif Serebriany, At the Fifth (London) Congress of the RSDRP (April–May 1907) (1947). Oil on canvas, 271 × 263 cm. © 2007, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Plate 8. Fedor Shurpin, The Morning of Our Motherland (1949). Oil on canvas, 168 × 231 cm. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Plate 9. Stalin portrait by Nikolai Andreev, dated 1 April 1922. Likely because it showed his pockmarks, Stalin wrote in red pencil across the portrait: “This ear shows that the artist doesn’t know anatomy. J. Stalin. The ear screams, is a gross offense against anatomy. J. St.” And yet, though it would have been easy for Stalin to censor the drawing, one version (without comments) was exhibited at the Tretyakov Gallery throughout the Stalin period. Pencil and crayon on paper, 32 × 24.5 cm. © David King Collection, London.
Plate 10. Ernest Lipgart, Portrait of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia (1900). Oil on canvas, 165 × 110 cm. Original at Tsarskoe Selo Museum.
Plate 11. An example of a modernist Stalin portrait: Pavel Filonov, Portrait of J. V. Stalin (1936). Oil on canvas, 99 × 67 cm. © 2007, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Plate 12. Isaak Brodsky, Portrait of J. V. Stalin (1937). Oil on canvas, 210 × 143 cm. © 2007, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Plate 13. An example of NEP-era “scientific” viewer studies: graph of viewer reactions during the play The Seven Wives of Ivan the Terrible at the Safonov Theater, 1 December 1925. Source: RGALI, f. 645, op. 1, d. 312, l. 1. © RGALI.
Plate 14. Cover of comment book, “15 Years of Soviet Art” exhibition at Tretyakov Gallery, 1933. Source: OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 513. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Plate 15. Inside cover of comment book, “15 Years of Soviet Art” exhibition. “Comrades visitors! Write your comments about the sculpture exhibition in this book. State Museum of Visual Arts, July 1933.” Source: OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 513. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Plate 16. Inside pages in comment book, “15 Years of Soviet Art” exhibitions. Note the spontaneity of this early comment book with visitors using the margins to comment on comments. Source: OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 513, ll. 6ob.-7. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Plate 17. An example of Stalin-era reception as performance: leather-bound comment book, “Art of the Georgian SSR” exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, 1937–1938. Source: OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 770. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Plate 18. Evgeny Katsman, Visitors with Kalinin (1927). Charcoal and pastel, 92 × 146 cm. © 2007, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Plate 19. Actor Mikhail Gelovani as Stalin in the movie The Fall of Berlin (1949–1950). Photograph Filmmuseum München.
Plate 20. An anonymous note on scrap paper passed to the stage at Alexei Diky’s celebrity evening. “Please tell us, have you met with comrade Stalin to prepare for your role?” Source: RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 40. © RGALI.
Plate 21. Another anonymous note: “Tell us why you speak without the characteristic accent, when you play J. V. Stalin.” Source: RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 34. © RGALI.
With this day the Soviet festive calendar reached its end point. Thus the annual cycle was punctuated by ten holidays that were intimately tied with Stalin’s image. The holiest of holidays were International Workers’ Day on 1 May and the Day of the October Revolution on 7 November. After 1945, Victory Day (on 9 May) joined this group of principal holidays. The second-tier holidays included the day of Lenin’s death on 21 January, the Day of the Soviet Army on 23 February, and the Day of the Stalin Constitution on 5 December. Further down the hierarchy were the Day of the Bolshevik Press on 5 May, the Physical Culture Day (usually in late July), and the three additional military days (the Day of the Soviet Navy on 27 July, the Day of the Soviet Air Force on 3 August or later, and the Day of Tankmen on 8 September).
ANOTHER BIRTHDAY AND A FUNERAL: STALIN’S SWAN SONG
In December 1949 the preparations for Stalin’s seventieth birthday on the twenty-first surfaced on the pages of Pravda. Articles with titles like “We Shall Mark Comrade J. V. Stalin’s Seventieth Birthday with New Industrial Successes” or “Socialist Competition in Honor of Stalin’s Seventieth Birthday Is Expanding” announced the beginning of a major campaign leading up to the birthday, some of which were “socialist commitments” to overfulfill the plan.134 The campaign’s intensity mounted and its reach expanded, a point that was driven home by the slogan “The people-wide socialist competition in honor of Stalin’s seventieth birthday is widening.”135 Reports about birthday preparations in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and even France, followed in due course. So did an article, “The People’s Love: In the Rooms with Gifts for J. V. Stalin,” on an exhibition of gifts for Stalin, which gave readers a foretaste of the display.136 Archival sources reveal that the exhibition divided a total of 1,398 gifts into those “from workers from capitalist countries,” “from workers in countries of people’s democracy,” and “from the peoples of the USSR.”137 The gifts included: from Australia, a “Bowl-shaped tobacco box. The bowl was carved out 100 years ago by one of the first settlers in Australia. From Neili Kinning. 1945”;138 from the United States, a “Headdress of an Indian war leader. Awarded by the meeting of Indian tribes from the U.S.A. and Canada. ‘To the greatest warrior J. V. Stalin.’ The headdress is made of eagle feathers. On 20 February 1942 in Brooklyn, New York, the traditional meeting of twenty-seven Indian tribes from the U.S.A. and Canada took place, at which J. V. Stalin was elected honory leader (vozhd’)”;139 from “Palestine,” as it called present-day Israel: “A Book. K. Marx, ‘Capital.’ In Ancient Hebrew. From the Central Committee of the Labor Party of Palestine. 1947”;140 from France: a “Neolithic ax, found in Moustier. From Mrs. Sere. 1945”;141 and from Moscow, going back to 1932: a “Portrait of J. V. Stalin. Branded in wood. For 1 May 1932. From the communist workers and invalid Red Army soldiers of the Moscow Military Hospital.”142
Included in the exhibition was a painting of three weavers holding a Stalin portrait as a template, in the process of producing a gift for Stalin in the form of a tapestry (Fig. 2.27). The painting was also to be shown at a 1949 art exhibition on the occasion of Stalin’s birthday. Thus the borders between photography, popular folk art, and academic oil paintings, between “high” and “low,” were erased: the folk artists weaving a Stalin tapestry based on a printed (mass media) photo were shown in an easel painting, which in turn was reproduced in the print mass medium Pravda.143 On 17 December Mao Zedong was shown arriving in Moscow; the birthday was now called “the great date (velikaia data),” and articles reported on the “Preparation for the Great Date in China” and the Czech people’s “Feelings of Sincere Love” for Stalin.144
Figure 2.27. “A gift for Comrade Stalin”: painting for Stalin’s birthday of weavers producing a Stalin tapestry from a Stalin portrait for Stalin’s b
irthday. Painting by N. Chebakov. Pravda, 12. December 1949, 2.
Finally the “great date” arrived. On Wednesday, 21 December 1949, a news-free and double-length (twelve pages instead of six) issue of Pravda featured a photo of Stalin that took up four-fifths of the left-hand page. Stalin is shown standing in his office in his marshal’s uniform with a round-tipped collar, the single Hero of Socialist Labor medal on his jacket, hands folded in front, wearing black shoes. The room has parquet flooring, in the background is his desk (with a globe), and on the wall is a picture of Lenin reading Pravda. The picture was in fact a variation of an image by M. Kalashnikova that, despite its drawing-like feeling, had been designated a “photograph” and had originally appeared on 7 November 1948. There were differences: in the 1948 version, Stalin’s hands were behind his back; in 1948 there were five buttons in his uniform while in 1949 there were four, his hands covered the fifth; and the 1948 picture was cropped at his knees while the 1949 version was full-length (Fig. 2.28). Beneath the photo of Stalin a caption read: “Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet on the award to Comrade Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin of the Order of Lenin.” Each of the following pages was filled with full-page articles by Stalin’s “closest comrades-in-arms” about his multiple roles (most of which corresponded to stock visual images). Malenkov wrote of “Comrade Stalin—the Leader of Progressive Mankind,” Molotov on “Stalin and the Stalin Leadership,” Beria on “The Great Inspirer and Organizer of the Victories of Communism,” Bulganin on “Stalin and the Soviet Armed Forces,” Khrushchev of “The Stalin Friendship of Peoples—a Guarantee of the Invincibility of Our Homeland,” and so on. This issue was overwhelmingly textual. The fact that the only other picture of Stalin (apart from the front page) was a photo taken after the beginning of the war, on 7 November 1941, showing Stalin at the rostrum with a microphone, testifies once more to the key place this event had come to occupy in both the Stalin cult and Soviet culture at large.145 On 22 December, covering the upper third of the first page was a photograph of Stalin standing in the front row between Mao Zedong and Walter Ulbricht with an international group of Communist leaders on the stage of the Bolshoi. Stalin was also present in an oversized, gold-framed portrait standing in front of the curtain as well as on flags and in the slogan on the curtain: “Long live the great leader and teacher of the Communist Party and the Soviet people Comrade J. V. Stalin!” The caption listed all the luminaries of the Soviet bloc from left to right, regardless of rows: Palmiro Togliatti, A. N. Kosygin, L. M. Kaganovich, Mao Zedong, N. A. Bulganin, J. V. Stalin, W. Ulbricht, Yu. Tsedenbal, N. S. Khrushchev, I. Koplenig, Dolores Ibarruri, G. Gheorghiu-Dej, M. A. Suslov, N. M. Shvernik, V. Chervenkov, G. M. Malenkov, V. Široky, L. P. Beria, K. E. Voroshilov, V. M. Molotov, A. I. Mikoian, Mátyás Rákosi. Everyone was standing and applauding, including Stalin himself. In the same issue there was a photograph of Stalin shaking hands with children.146 From this day on— for almost two years until early October 1951—nearly every issue of Pravda (usually on page two) showcased a rubric, “A Torrent of Greetings,” with congratulatory telegrams and letters from individuals and organizations from all over the Soviet Union.147
Figure 2.28. Photo on the front page of the seventieth birthday issue. Pravda, 21 December 1949, 1.
In 1950 Stalin (as played by Gelovani) with his pipe and behind his desk made an extraordinary appearance when on 25 January Pravda published stills from a Kremlin office scene in Chiaureli’s centerpiece of Stalin cinematography, The Fall of Berlin. Beside articles on the film, the reader was offered a spectrum of enthusiastic comments by moviegoers, among them the sculptor Vera Mukhina.148 From early February 1950 onward there was a sense of preparation in images and texts for the upcoming elections to the Supreme Soviet. Every day on the front page some assembly of a factory or organization in the Soviet Union nominated Stalin as their number one candidate for deputy in the Supreme Soviet. Election day on 13 March was a dazzling display of what the lead article touted as the “triumph of Soviet democracy.” An unreal Stalin, who looked as if he was being played by a double, was shown placing his ballot into a flower-decorated ballot box, ostentatiously sealed to represent Soviet democracy. The other pictures of voters putting their ballots into ballot boxes all featured large Stalin portraits or plaster busts in the background.149 Two days later Stalin appeared in a photo in his gray marshal’s uniform next to the election results—a near-perfect victory for him, needless to say.150 Thus in 1950 Pravda still staged elaborate performances of Soviet pseudo-democracy.
On May Day there was a front-page photo of Stalin in his marshal’s uniform. A day later the newspaper’s first page showed the Communist leadership saluting the May Day parade on the tribune of the mausoleum, Stalin standing in the center, Bulganin to his left and Malenkov to his right from the viewer’s angle. To Stalin’s left almost everyone wore military uniforms and numerous medals, to his right everyone wore coats and dark suits without medals. Late Stalinism did not mean that campaigns to mobilize the population for a certain cause disappeared entirely. In early May, for example, Pravda showed workers at Moscow’s Vladimir Ilyich factory signing up for a new state loan with a Stalin portrait in the background.151 Pseudo-democracy was sometimes seen in ethnically adapted images of Stalin, as in a huge portrait of an Azerbaijanized Stalin hanging on the wall behind a Baku husband and wife putting their ballots in the box.152 Thus Pravda continued to serve as an agitational platform for state projects that demanded the involvement of the population and Stalin’s image continued to serve as symbol to rally the population in these campaigns. Nor did High Stalinism mean that all representations of the leader became allegorical or metaphorical. Sometimes he was involved very concretely, as in an article, “Thanks to the Leader,” which credited Stalin with the building of the postwar “great constructions of communism,” notably hydroelectric stations and canals.153
The Day of the October Revolution in 1950 introduced a new photograph of Stalin, in which Stalin’s upper torso was shown behind a balustrade (likely on the mausoleum tribune) in his gray marshal’s uniform with his single medal, wearing a black marshal’s cap with a single Soviet star on the front, with gray hair and a gray moustache but hardly any extra chin, which strangely made him appear both younger and older at the same time (Fig. 2.29). His face was directed toward the camera lens yet his gaze was pointed left, into the distance. His body was, quite unusually, turned ninety degrees, thus creating a more dynamic, less static image. The photos of the actual parade on Red Square featured Stalin indirectly, in a poster on the façade of GUM, not in person.154 He was to appear only one last time on this holiday, in 1952.
Figure 2.29. Day of the October Revolution 1950—one of the last new photographs of Stalin. Pravda, 7 November 1950, 1.
In the habitual photograph of the 21 January 1951 meeting at the Bolshoi on the occasion of Lenin’s death, Stalin was the only Party leader holding his hands folded in front. Malenkov was to his left and his uniform was the lightest of all. If there was any effort to make someone beside Stalin stand out, this time it was concentrated on Malenkov.155 On May Day itself, in a reprinted photograph, Stalin appeared in his gray marshal’s uniform, a day later he appeared indirectly, on posters showing him on the mausoleum tribune between Malenkov and Bulganin, carried by a motley and seemingly very happy crowd on Red Square.156 On 3 May there was another—and extraordinary—photo of the May Day parade, showing Bulganin on the left on the tribune, a space, then a blonde Russian Pioneer girl, then Stalin holding her arm and smiling or speaking with the girl. To present-day Anglo-American eyes, Stalin’s gaze seems lecherous, while the girl looks up to him respectfully. Stalin was in a new greatcoat with a collar he had never worn before and in a new cap with new ornamentation. In the picture caption’s words, the “first-grader Ira Melnikova of school no. 131 presented Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin with a bouquet in the name of the Pioneers of Moscow.”157 The picture is unusual both in its rare depiction of Stalin with a child, and in its spe
cific type of representation.
The rest of the year was much like previous ones and 1952 in Pravda again began like a routine year of depicting Stalin. On 9 March and 19 April, readers witnessed the export of round-number birthday celebrations of leaders from the Soviet Union to its satellite states, with the treatment of Hungary’s Mátyás Rákosi’s sixtieth birthday and Poland’s Boleslaw Bierut’s sixtieth birthday respectively.158 As in the year before, on 3 May Stalin appeared on the tribune of the Lenin Mausoleum in a rather unusual photograph with yet another blonde Russian schoolgirl, this year hugging and kissing him, as Malenkov looked on. The caption explained: “First-grader Vera Kondakova of Moscow school no. 612 warmly greets Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin after he has received a bouquet.”159 In October Stalin appeared at a Party gathering for the last two times before his death, more precisely, at the Nineteenth Party Congress. The depiction of Stalin in the presidium was much as it had been in recent years—as Malenkov spoke at the rostrum, Stalin sat in the row behind the rostrum alone and aloof, looking gray and old, even holding his chin and, unusually, with his hand touching his face.160 A week later he was shown on the far left at the rostrum giving his speech at the “final meeting of the Nineteenth Party Congress.”161 A day after the Revolution Day parade he was shown for the last time on the tribune of the Lenin Mausoleum, standing in the left center between Bulganin and Timoshenko, and as usual, a day later people were shown carrying Stalin posters at 7 November demonstrations in Baku and Stalingrad.162 The 5 December 1952 issue carried the habitual Stalin Constitution Day photo of 1936 for the last time; the customary 1922 photograph of Lenin and Stalin in Gorki was shown for the last time on 21 January 1953.163